Did your PS Vita get recently banned? This might be the root cause (and how to fix)

Recently, several people have been complaining about getting their PS Vita banned by Sony, allegedly after using a hacked 3.60 PS Vita (running HENkaku) to access some of Sony’s services, including the PSN. Unsurprisingly, such reports started showing up after Team Molecule released an update that restored PSN access to hacked PS Vitas.

To my knowledge, there hasn’t been any verifiable report of account or hardware ban from the PSN for people using HENkaku. However, there has been quite a few people confirming their IP had been banned.

PS Vita IB Banned, workaround and fix

Which type of ban you are subject to is fairly easy to verify: if you cannot login from your home, but the same account and console can login from a different network (e.g. a friend’s), then the problem is with your IP, not your account. If, however, you can’t login with that account, from any network, then it might be your account, or your console, that got banned (you can further verify by trying the same account on a friend’s console to differentiate between a console ban and an account ban, although I’d advise against risking a friend’s console for that kind of test… you don’t want Sony to affiliate your friend’s console with your banned account).

Despite what some people claim, IP bans from Sony are a real thing, but are generally temporary (1 day or 2). Unlike console or account bans which are probably extremely targeted and proactive, it is likely that IP bans are just a regular protection on Sony’s servers to reduce risks of DoS. In other words, it doesn’t directly matter if your console is hacked or not: if you hammer Sony’s servers for one reason or another, there’s a risk they will temporarily ban your IP. It is, in general, not a big deal, and the easiest way to solve the issue is to either reboot your router (which for many of you will give you a new IP address), or wait a couple days before accessing Sony’s systems again. Alternatively, you can try to use a VPN.

Clean up you PS Vita to avoid future Bans

The real problem, of course, is to stop this from happening again. To do that, you’ll have to identify what behavior on your end is causing your home network to access Sony’s servers too often. User nota16er on Reddit came up with a potential culprit: the Vita app Near. According to nota16er, the Near application pings Sony’s servers up to 16 times per second, making it very likely that the servers will block your IP after a while.

Nota16er further explains:

You can easily turn these off by opening Near, clicking the settings icon in the bottom left, going to “Sharing Settings” and disabling Near’s automatic location updates., as well as going into “Location Data” and disabling “Obtain location automatically at regular intervals”. You might also want to limit the frequency you manually update your location as well if you do use this program. Because, like I learned in my experiments, every time you update your location it contacts Sony’s servers way more than it should. I’ve no idea exactly why it does this, but I’m fairly certain it has to do with not having the most recent firmware.

I think he nails it in the last sentence: it’s likely that not running the latest firmware (while pretending to) causes some sort of glitch in the interaction between Near and Sony’s servers, which could trigger an infinite loop of pings to the servers.

Near might not be the only app on a hacked PS Vita that’s behaving strangely and could cause a ban. Nota16er also suggested the following, which makes sense:

you can check your auto-start settings under System and disable all that’s listed there. There’s a Near option listed there as well as something. You can also check PlayStation Network, under settings, and disable anything under Automatic Update Settings.

If you’ve been the target of some IP ban from Sony’s systems, we’d love your feedback on this.

Kinda glad here that pstv lacks these apps out of the box, or from the looks of the psn store can’t even use them as near isn’t in the downloadable apps list there. I among the other pstv users would probably be in the same boat as the vita handheld users getting banned, which sucks, but at least there’s ways to get around it on that end.

Wondering this too. I used the PSN to download Lunar: Silver Star Harmony a few days ago, but I don’t know if my console got banned and I don’t really want to risk a ban by checking to see if I’m banned to begin with.

I honestly think it would be pointless for 3.63 to get hacked now. Typically when sony starts this banning *** they follow it up with firmware update so that whatever everyone is doing is then ineffective. Might not see a update super soon, but I’d be willing to bet one will come eventually.

I think Sony has moved on from the Vita by now. They’re probably done with firmware updates. Maybe they’ll try one last time like with the PSP back in early 2015, but it won’t be anything major. Best time for hackers to work without their work getting invalidated by an update is now. A true, permanent CFW would be great right about now, and probably wouldn’t be hard to update for future patches (if there will be any).

I wouldn’t count on them necessarily moving away from vita yet in terms of firmware updates. There’s still some games being developed for it that anyone can buy and play anywhere they want. Not to mention they’re psn market is still active, so last thing they want with a saturated market in terms of hardware is people having a means to rip them off in some way on psn, cause frankly they’re making money off of psn sales still from those that own vita related hardware.

Last but not least. I never put anything past sony when they start pro-actively banning users on 3.60 henkaku vitas.

How are we going to rip them off in some way on PSN? I don’t think we’ve hacked the store like with the 3DS, where you can literally download anything for free (iirc). The Vita PSN market means nothing when anyone with working internet can still buy stuff from it via their phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, PS4, and even their PS3 if they have one. They could shut down the Vita PSN store now and it wouldn’t have a huge impact.

ZeroSbr you don’t need a store clone to cripple their sales when full blown piracy exists. To those with a vita product above 3.60 too bad for updating no one is publicly working on anything for you. Get another vita product or mobo at 3.60 or lower. That’s your only option for now.

The amount of jerk offs in the comments on that PS3 VPN article, proclaiming that Sony don’t IP ban are unbelievable. They read one comment stating what they “believe to be factual”, and circle jerk the confirmation bias. Yes, Sony does IP ban for a variety of reasons; ALONG WITH account / console bans for more serious offences.

ZeroSbr you pretty much said why they’d go to another firmware version. They don’t want the psn marketplace on vita being like the 3DS marketplace. It all starts at one point, which is spoofing your firmware version to a higher version to access something that would typically need the newest firmware to access. If they left it unchecked it would get to a point of no return for sony eventually. That and they typically don’t play around when they patch things. They won’t let it go unchecked when they see signs of their psn being compromised in some capacity. No matter how insignificant it may seem.

Agreed IP ban of your modems main IP given is very true you can try to reset your modem in hopes of getting a new IP from your service provider lifting that type of blacklist ban, on another note before i bought my ps4 i decided to torrent a movie which was a product of Sony entertainment and all services to do with Sony on my end where blacklisted, I reset my modem but after a week i got the same blacklist ban from Sony on a new IP, I figured out that Sony can collect your MAC address of the device your Internet user name all info linked to your Internet by just asking your Internet service provider which is not against the law, I myself was too scared to tal to my ISP so i found a neat program called titanium mac address changer, I used the program to change my wireless 5ghz AP cards mac address, From their on out i have not been banned so if you truly decide to fool around with illegal things against Sony in any way games, movies etc, I would honestly VPN yourself and use the MAC address changer along with it and once done change your MAC address with that program, For the ps vita side of thing use a hardwired into your pc for the net and if you have a wireless card use that as your access point through your pc so that the PS vita has the VPN feature as of the same for your pc and for changing your PS vita MAC address is a far different story, maybe one day one of our famous programers might find a nifty way to help us in that area.

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